The Spaces Between

On teams that are newly cross-functional, or in places with waterfallish reflexes, the coaching opportunities lie in helping them find ways to combine their skills. Pair two roles and challenge them. Encourage them to explore sooner than they’d normally individually work.

Be weary when everyone considers design to be something that someone else does earlier, and especially if design is only considered visual or interactive.

Let them discover that design is something that they all do, in each of their own disciplines. Coding is design. Testing is design. The whole product and its quality is the culmination of everyone’s design work.

Test case design gives developers a chance to negotiate where and how and what test automation they will write, and what will be left to visual inspection, or maybe even selected for end-to-end integration testing. It will ensure they have the same use cases in their heads during implementation.

Product design informs interaction designers about critical business concepts and flows. It gives front-end developers an opportunity to understand and model the problem domain instead of letting it get framed by their favourite UI framework.

There are so many incredible ways they can combine their skills for better current and future product outcomes.